Re: Two New Software-Related Ideas

On 10/25/06, Shlomi Fish <shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]> wrote:

> Yes, I'm aware of GNU texinfo. I don't remember why I didn't include it.
> Perhaps it was out of due frustration from its limitations or the fact that I
> found the "info" reader to be so counter-intuitive.
>

Driven away because of the frontend... exactly as I said in (3).
info is only intuitive to Emacsers, and most of them read the info
with the emacs frontend anyway.
 I wonder if there's a "viper"-like keyboard scheme for info, or a
standalone vi-like reader. These might do wonders to the popularity of
the system.

 Anyways, if you consider writing a new doc framework - supporting
info as input source would greatly increase the amount of docs
available to your system (the useful ones, at least ;-)).

> I normally use the HTML documentation (as converted from the texinfo sources)
> at gnu.org.
>

That's remote documentation - not available when your'e offline, and
may not match the versions you have installed on your machine (that
is, unless your distro takes care of installing these htmls locally in
a centralized way - e.g. dhelp and friends)

 Maybe it would be better to use your desktop's help system - I think
both KDE and Gnome help are aware of the installed info docs and allow
you to browse and read them.

>
> One problem Nadav once mentioned with the info pages, is that they are split
> into several sections and sub-sections and so one cannot search them for a
> keyword as conveniently as one can using a man page.

I was told that too.
But this is FALSE (maybe it was true in old versions - I don't know).

Both normal search (s, prompts for input, like '/' in man) and the
electric-search (^s, search-as-you-type, like '/' in firefox) work
across sections (they view the whole topic as if it was one big
document).
 btw, in the Emacs frontend, electric search is page-local, which is,
in fact, one of the reasons I prefer the standalone info reader.


 
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